PHONE PHOTOS: PART 2 — BEAUTIFUL!

JUMP TO EXTRA GOOD

Hi!  Sorry, very sorry for my delay in posting here:

a.) You might have noticed I have not figured out which day of the week I'd like to send out new Here's One Good Thing material — still finding my groove! I am leaning towards Tuesday/Wednesday/maybe Thursday, so let's see how it goes 🤞.

b.) More to the point, I was not home to post this past Friday-Sunday and am not smooth enough yet to pre-post. Rick’s bday was on the 14th, and we headed up to celebrate in Breckenridge, which is the Denver-metro area's closest full-fledged ski town.  We hit the road at 1 pm and were ON a gondola by 3:10 p.m.  We are now four years into Boulder County-town life, and this proximity still feels like a geographic miracle.

[Timing disclaimer: It is rarely so quick + easy to navigate 1-70 up into flinty Summit County.  We’ve still had no snow in CO, which meant the road conditions were more like dry-July. And with only a few patches of artificial snow limited to Peak 8, who was even bothering with a trip to Breckenridge?  We were!  Practically had the whole town to ourselves!]

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So last week we covered the habit of holding on to phone pics maybe longer than necessary.  I concluded that the resulting photo pile-up could be classified as a problem, but — on the whole — it was a “good” problem to have.  Thank you to the poll-responders who helped me determine that yes, this level of accumulation is more of a “Libby” problem than a general problem ... but a big shout-out to the one person who voted “I am right there with you, Libby (over 50,000)." I have to say I somewhat envy the two "I am more disciplined than you, Libby (fewer than 10,000)" votes. Go ahead and feel very smug and proud today!

Quick recap: in my last post, I showed 19 pics from that week’s camera roll to illustrate the patterns of my thinking (Keep, Delete, Maybe Delete, Maybe Keep, I Really Don’t Know).  But those 19 photos were just a SNAPSHOT of the 74,422 other photos on my phone at that moment, which combined are a jumbled medley of pragmatism (a coupon code); treasured memory (the pic of my wide-smiling mom holding a bowl of green beans); comfort (dogs we’ve loved); gift ideas (a perfect t-shirt for E); new places (Telluride!); old places (Table Rock Lake!); food (Saturday's lunch at Empire Burger to send to my brother, Greg); beautiful hand-made design (from the fiber arts fair with C last month); funny stuff (a recent New Yorker daily calendar cartoon); and more.

As you might imagine with this sort of topical scatter, my camera roll — while often entertaining and educational — is not a very calming place to be.  Instead, it's a type of familiar, self-inflicted chaos that I both accept and perpetuate as an otherwise anti-chaos person — a Yay-Ugh yin yang that seems like a kind of photo lifestyle destiny.  

But I have some workarounds!  The key to shifting from the irregular splatter of my regular camera roll to the peaceful visual pasture of single–topic photos is the ALBUMS function.  iPhone albums are my oases of order and peace.  And since finally alphabetizing the 200+ albums on my phone, I am now pretty quick to find where I want to land.  For example, when I need a fast, positive mental reset, one of my most reliable tricks is to instantly immerse myself in any of my top three types of albums.

1. Pics of loved ones are my #1 go-to calmer / re-orienter / heart-settler.  To be discussed in a future post 😌.  

2. Pics of pets, both past and present, is #2 for me.  (Our most recent past dog, Goldie — now gone seven years — somehow qualifies as both past and present.  And now there’s C’s cat Pea, who does not live with us but is so present in our pics that you might think she does).  Pet posts are also on the schedule 🐶.

3. Pics of beauty rank as my #3 go-to mood-booster and represent our ONE GOOD THING for today.  The photos in this post come direct from nature, but — naturally — I have loads more featuring art and architecture and will save them for another day. No matter the subject or scope, it’s really quite amazing that we can have rows and rows of extraordinary scenes just waiting right there in our pockets 🌻.  

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Photos of beauty are scattered like gemstones throughout my camera roll, but I try to continually consolidate my very favorites into one central, easy-to-access album.  For a long time this beauty consolidation album was named PRETTY PICS!, but after the alphabetizing, PRETTY PICS got buried among the other Ps like PIKE PLACE MARKET, PLANTS, PRINT THESE! and PUMPKIN PATCH.  The long scroll to the P section only delayed the peace-through-beauty I was seeking, so I moved them closer to the top with a more alphabetically-accessible name: “BEAUTIFUL!”  That did the trick!  Now I can quickly bypass much of the clutter of my camera roll and sink straight away into a small sea of calming awe:

A QUICK ASIDE:  There is a good argument to be made that we don’t need to pull out our cameras for every lovely experience — that the experience itself can be enough and will do its magical shaping of our minds and memories without the annoying, interrupting production of documentation.  VALID, YES, though my previously-described cheesecloth memory just works better with visual reminders.  You could further argue that taking 45 photos of a miracle-moment dilutes the experience of the miracle itself.  ALSO VALID.  But for me, the real-live miracle or beauty I see in one specific moment in time becomes a miracle or beauty I can return to or be surprised by again and again.  I so love the later access and extension of my memory that this is the rare mild-moral dilemma I don’t bother to internally debate.

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Most photos filling my BEAUTIFUL! album fall into three groups: Far-from-Home pics, Close-to-Home pics, and Ordinary Places pics.

FAR-FROM-HOME BEAUTIFUL PICS:

Going on any sort of trip — short, long, business, pleasure, budget, splurge — is a transporting experience.  We travel, in part, to be transformed by new places, experiences, food, people, and views.  It’s the photographed views we are talking about here, and instead of a full Hanaway travelogue that no one should endure, I’ll deep-dive into the pics from a single night of unexpected, far-from-home, astonishingly untamed beauty.

A few years ago, Rick + I had an event a couple hours south of the Bay Area; en route we spent the night in Pacifica, a very low-key, sleepy-ish surf town south of San Francisco.  It was a coastal-California-affordable overnight stop (when you stay on points at the local Marriott Fairfield Inn) on the way to the main event in fairytale Carmel-by-the-Sea.  To this day, our Pacifica night remains one of my top photo memory destinations.  

We had dinner at Nick’s Seafood Restaurant, a now-98-year-old local-legend spot with wood paneling decorated with lobster nets and flocks of fake seagulls — not in the style of an old surf-town supper club-type restaurant but as an actual old surf-town supper club-type restaurant filled with locals who knew staff members by name.  Nick’s is separated from the wild rocky coastline by a single strip of straight-in parking, so the view out the windows becomes central to the Nick’s experience.  I loved everything about this place.  

The first photos of the night — the laminated menu, the drinks, the garlic bread — were time-stamped between 6:30 and 6:56 p.m.  

And then — with sincerest apologies to Rick — the night went off the rails.  I could see the sky changing colors from our booth at the window; I took Rick's hand, looked him deeply in the eyes, and said, "I-am-so-sorry-but-I-need-to-run-outside-and-take-a-quick-pic."  I took 60-some in that first round, and then returned ASAP so we could leisurely enjoy our entrees.

And a short video because ocean waves are seriously soothing:

So I am proud to say we did then leisurely enjoy our entrees, but in that little gap between dinner and dessert, the sky was turning inky and the sunlight flattened into a deep orange line on the horizon. So I ran back out to take 23 more:

Thankfully, by the time dessert arrived, it was pitch-black outside or it all could have been much worse.  So not my finest moment of dining or marriage etiquette, but there was a pounding miracle of color and water and sound right outside and I felt called to capture it for memory.  The pics from our Pacifica stopover are still among my Go-To-est pics of the entire BEAUTIFUL! album.

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NEAR-TO-HOME BEAUTIFUL PICS:

Travel is not always in budget or in sync with a particular life stage; when the girls were younger, we went long stretches without any kind of destination/vacation-y travel, but that did not stop the camera roll beauty.  Granted, when you tell someone who lives in a drenched-in-beauty spot like Colorado or the Pacific Northwest to just go outside and find some beauty, that’s basically saying, “Take three small steps out your door and be dazzled.”  Some places do have that competitive edge. 

But local beauty works almost anywhere.  I grew up in a very flat, very rectangle-blocked Chicago suburb, but we had our tall, leafy Elm trees and the local forest preserve and my mom’s clematises climbing the fence in the back yard.  When my sister Sandra + family lived near Cleveland, they regularly walked their regal German Shepherd, Lola, through one of Ohio’s magnificent forested Metro Parks just minutes from home.  And when Rick + I lived in a small, dark newlywed apartment in the city of Chicago, we could soak in a bright, wide-open view of beauty with a 30-minute walk to Lake Michigan.  No direct access to nature?  A spray-painted cement-wall mural or a blooming sidewalk weed counts, too.  

Current backyard

Current backyard

Current backyard

Harper Lake, 15 minutes from home

CSU Annual Flower Trial Gardens, one hour from home

Waneka Lake, 7 minutes from home

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ORDINARY PLACES BEAUTIFUL PICS: 

The third kind of natural beauty on my camera roll is an underdog beauty, which by its humble nature becomes a favorite: grocery store beauty, parking lot beauty, sidewalk beauty, Home Depot garden center beauty.  Will the beauty encountered during your weekly errands reach postcard-from-Tahiti splendor?  Probably not, but it absolutely elevates the regular-ness of our days into something MORE.  BEAUTY IS EVERYWHERE is one of several hills upon which I stake my ground.  And so, when you see someone taking pics of the produce display at Safeway, just know it might be me or someone like me: phone camera operators who are very VERY pro-Ordinary Places Beauty.

Lafayette Farmers Market

Walmart Garden Center

Tuscon AZ Marriott hotel parking lot

Denver sidewalk near C's work

Summer cherries in the kitchen sink

King Soopers Grocery Store

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And so, from the good problem of too many photos comes the pretty good solution of corralling the best of them into easy-access albums for a nearly-instant mood elevator whenever needed.  It’s all right there in your pocket.  Try it this week and let me know how it goes!

Q of the Week: Where did you take the most beautiful pic(s) on your camera roll?

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EXTRA GOOD

ALSO LINKED THROUGH THE EXTRA GOOD PAGE HERE

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2025

1. GOOD FUN:  I mentioned gondolas up at the top of the post so casually that you might think I FREQUENT gondolas.  Not so.  For one, we are not skiers.  For two, only recently have I overcome my mid-level terror of gondola heights and mechanics. On the few times we gondola-ed with the girls, I made a big production of saying I was scared but “I”M DOING IT ANYWAY!” in a shaky effort to instill the virtue of courage.  And so they saw me white-knuckling it in a comfy Whistler gondola cabin one summer as 12-year-olds on fat-tired bikes wildly, spiritedly, recklessly careened down the steep mountain directly below us.  Everyone has a different starting point, as they say.

My fear-to-joy turnaround happened this summer in Telluride, a ski town that may have the most calming gondola — and most beautiful gondola cabins — of all.  And as in Breckenridge, the gondola ride at Telluride is completely free (albeit, in the same way football games at E’s beloved TCU were “free” to students 🤔).  We stayed just yards from Telluride’s gondola station, such that we went back and forth to the Mountain Village several times with no agenda at all.  My fear was so vanquished that we squeezed in one more agenda-less ride before leaving on our final morning, delicious local coffee in hand.  The experience was so transformatively enjoyable that I am actually including a pic of me in braces, something I generally try to avoid … for obvious reasons.  Also including the best ski-dog photography and a re-creation by area middle-school students of Van Gogh's Starry Night — both works greet riders up at the San Sophia Station halfway point.  

"Gondogola" by Mary Kenez

If you haven’t had a chance to ride on a ski gondola, either by geography or by fear, this 2:16 YouTube video from Telluride is a nice quick stand-in (except when it gets fuzzy at the end).  ENJOY THE RIDE!

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2. GOOD-NATURED:  In some parts of the country, last Tuesday night was a feast for the eyes and cameras.  If you knew to be looking and the conditions were just right, you could see the aurora borealis — or northern lights — right with your very own eyes (though enhanced by a camera on its night setting).  I found out about this stellar atmospheric event when our next-door-neighbor K. sent a glowing pic at 7:38 p.m. Tuesday night; we weren't outside and she wanted to make sure we knew about it … which we did not; instead we were out that evening without one single clue that something spectacular was happening in the night sky.  I was SHOCKED by my lack of awareness and preparation, especially given my self-proclaimed dedication to all things beautiful. [We recently reduced our wildly-expensive daily newspaper delivery to Wednesday - Sunday, possibly one reason we missed the memo; this is but one small reason local journalism matters].  

So we did not get an actual photo that night, but so many sky-watchers from Colorado and states beyond were flooding the feeds that it felt like we were nearly there in the pinky-red and green scenes anyway.  I mentioned our local weather guy, Kody in my Summerfall post, and he captured the DELIGHT of so many last Tuesday night.  Like a massive virtual classroom-full of excited, hyped-up kids, THOUSANDS of followers sent in photos.  Everyone seemed to have his or her very own miracle to share, and then combined it became a scene of collective, group-project awe.  Kody’s enthusiasm about the public’s enthusiasm spread the enthusiasm farther out to non-participants like me:

The northern lights were expected to be visible the next night, too, and so after having dinner with our photo-sending neighbors next door, we all went outside to try again.  This is what I got on our cloudy Wednesday night:

Sometimes it really is all about the timing.  Catch me regularly checking the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center from this day forward ✨.

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UPDATES:

MANNY'S DELI SNAP BENEFIT RELIEF FUND UPDATE from Phone Photos: Part 1 post:

$84,502 now raised toward the increased-again goal of $90,000 🏆

LIBBY'S PHONE PHOTO TOTALS UPDATE, also from Phone Photos: Part 1 post:

SCREENSHOTS on 11/18/2025: 9,360 (original: 9,321 on 11/07/2025)

TOTAL PHONE PHOTOS on 11/18/2025: 74,438 (original: 74,422 on 11/07/2025)

Okay, I did some deleting but then we went to Breckenridge, so it actually got worse. But we are home this upcoming weekend and I plan to make dramatic progress in the days ahead 💥!

SEE YOU AGAIN NEXT WEEK FOR ANOTHER BATCH OF GOOD

😀